It’s something that isn’t really being picked up in the responses I’ve heard so far.

Better off people, higher rate tax payers, are getting a much bigger tax cut than those on low incomes.

That’s right. If you are a basic rate tax payer, your tax threshold rises from £11,850 to £12,500. And while we’re on the subject, this is the annual “Tories take credit for Lib Dem idea” day. Remember how David Cameron told Nick Clegg the idea wasn’t affordable? Every year during the coalition, the Tories used to whinge like anything about having to implement this Lib Dem tax cut for the poorest. Now they just take credit for it like we never happened.

If you are a higher rate taxpayer, you won’t start paying the 40% rate until you are earning £50k, up from £46,350.That is proportionately a significantly higher tax cut than those on low incomes are getting. Sp much for fairness and helping the Just About Managing.

This, of course, is not the case in Scotland where higher rate taxpayers didn’t get last year’s rise and we’ll have to wait and see if Finance Secretary Derek Mackay repeats that this year. The Tories will create merry hell if he doesn’t as they continue with their agenda of grievance. I’d actually rather the SNP sorted public services out, to be honest.

I don’t live in a terribly affluent household, but, even so, a budget that gives us £20 or so extra a month while people are really struggling to find even the most basic housing, or to put food on the table, has got its priorities well and truly wrong.

I would much rather pay a bit more tax to make sure that people got the public services and medical treatment and social security that they need.

Add to this injustice the fact that Universal Credit has only had half of what George Osborne took out of it in 2015 as soon as we were out of the picture put back. If Iain Duncan Smith reckons it needs £2 billion, then it probably needs more to make it work for people.

The Tories will never be progressive – it is not in their nature. They should not be allowed to get way with pretending they have done anywhere near enough for the people on the lowest incomes, many of whom are actually in work.

11 Comments

From a tax prespective I’m a winner. However I’d rather he had left the 40% tax band alone and used the money to better fund public services. I’d feel a lot safer with more police and better funded social services than with £500 pounds a year in my pocket which I’ll only fritter away and will not bring me a feeling of security.

The more significant point is that half of the tiny “benefit” being delivered to basic rate taxpayers was due anyway, through the normal inflation-uprating of personal allowances, and the other half was due to be delivered next year anyway, when the budget announcement is that the basic rate allowance will now be frozen.

@Ian “the other half was due to be delivered next year anyway, when the budget announcement is that the basic rate allowance will now be frozen.”
Perhaps a hint of plans for a general election before then?

I don’t know about no more cuts but Hammond made some very dodgy moves to prevent immediate ‘real’ scrutiny.
Dumping his figures on the OBR (Guardian..”OBR roasts Treasury over budget tardiness”) at the last minute, not giving the opposition a copy of the budget before he spoke…
However, I’m sure he said that the ‘extra help’ for those on Universal Credit would start when ‘implementation is complete’; isn’t that supposedly in 2023, at the earliest, or did I mishear?

Just as Blair and co had a possibly once in a generation chance to make the U.K. a modern truly democratic state back in 1997, when the electorate was clearly crying out for change, and basically blew it, so the Tory Chancellor in 2018, with a country, if you believe the opinion polls, collectively willing to pay a bit more via direct taxation to make things better, did much the same.

Instead of cutting taxes he could easily have put them up by a couple of percentage points and raised well over £10 billion. He could have added a couple of top bands to the Council Tax and promised a root and branch reform to local government finance. I could go on; but suffice it to say that, come a ‘no deal’ Brexit, which is still not an impossibility, he might need that extra cash sooner rather than later.

£9 bn that could have been put on fuel duty using the fuel duty escalator. while cutting subsidies for electric cars.
Biggest item was the tax cut for the rich.
Looks like an election either when Brexit can’t be delivered, or after it has been, hoping for “leavers” to vote Tory in either case.

@ Caron, you write, “Add to this injustice the fact that Universal Credit has only had half of what George Osborne took out of it in 2015 as soon as we were out of the picture put back.”

It’s not just the money, Caron, it’s the system – introduced on the Lib Dem watch. ‘We were in the picture’. It needed proper scrutiny. They didn’t do it.

In today’s Guardian an old constituent of Danny’s, Neil MacVicar, writes,

“Cancer stole my independence – then I was humiliated by Universal Credit. Being diagnosed with a brain tumour at 25 was horrible enough. But then I was made to feel even worse by the benefits system.

I knew I couldn’t keep going without any income and just a couple of weeks after my brain surgery, still struggling with fatigue and other side effects, I went to the jobcentre to apply for universal credit. I desperately needed some help, after everything I’d been through. But instead of a saving grace, I was faced with another ordeal as I had to sit in front of a computer for an exhausting six hours to fill in the painstakingly long application form. I couldn’t believe this was the process for people, like me, who had been forced to leave jobs they loved because of ill health and were just trying to get by. Worse still, because I registered at the jobcentre in Scotland, when I did eventually move back to London, I couldn’t change my home and benefits to there. A further insult was that, because I was under 26, I wasn’t termed an adult, so I was entitled to even less. This was despite the fact that I left home at 19 and have been independent since then. The whole thing was humiliating.

People on the universal credit helpline weren’t any better. They dismissed my problems and told me I should go back home to Scotland. I felt real pressure to do this, but there’s nothing really left for me there. I don’t know many people there any more, it would just be me, mum and dad – and I’m no longer allowed to drive, which is a real disadvantage in a rural place like Inverness. I love being independent but cancer stole that and universal credit made it even worse”.

I’m afraid this can’t be glossed over with a ‘my party right or wrong’ response.

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